Theos-Talk Archives (August 2002 Message tt00137)

Dear bri,

The issues you bring up below could have been written
in any popular science publication, such as New
Scientist. Yes these publications are respected
amongst scientists but does that mean they are
necessarily right? Recently in Australia there were
several court cases that used DNA evidence as part of
the defence/prosecution. Scientists were invited to
interpret the results of the DNA tests. In one
instance the scientist misinterpreted the data and an
innocent man was jailed. Later, when the mistake was
proven, the lawyers were asked by the media why they
did not cross check the evidence with another
scientist. Their response was that if a scientist
tells you it is true then it must be true. 

Yes the latest claim is that we all descended from a
single tribe in Africa that was on the verge of
extinction but miraculously made it through. Have you
seen the actual results of the tests they conducted?
Do you know of the methodology that they adopted? How
do you know that they didn't fake the results in order
to gain recognition or that big research grant? 

The latest claim for the earliest man in Australia is
now set at 67,000 years before present. 50 years ago
scientists were convinced Aboriginals had not been in
Australia for more than 10,000 years. Then it was
20,000 years; then 35,000; then 40,000; then 30,000;
then 60,000; and now 67,000. There is a lot of
certainty here, isn't there? There are also so claims
that humans had arrived in the Americas at about this
same time (40 - 60,000 years ago), and not 10,000
years ago as is popularly cited.

Another line of evidence: palynology. We took a core
sample from a swamp and did a pollen sequence for the
last 1000 years. We then took another sample, 1m to
the left of our first sample, and got a competely
different assemblage of pollen. Yet scientist publish
their pollen sequences in reputable journals (eg
Kershaw, 1986, Nature) and extrapolate theories from
their results as if it is gospel. It is not gospel!
The same technique gives completely different
results!!

So the authors that you quote in your email below how
do you know that the theses they are presenting are
any more credible than that presented in the Secret
Doctrine? Science is infallible, indeed is inherently
so. Everything must be refuted, needs to be refuted,
otherwise it is not science. How, then, do you know
that the first principles that science is built on is
not false? If science has been built on logic that is
determined to be flawed how is anything that science
presents to us suppose to be taken to be real? Yes you
could say that science must be right because I am
typing on this computer and sending emails and I
wouldn't have such capabilities if science was not
right. But science only deals with phenomena, not
noumena, and how could science ever "prove" the thing
in itself? It is faculative impossible. Most science
is done a priori, not a posteriori!! And even if done
a posteriori interpretations can be so varied as to
leave the results meaningless.

mic

--- brianmuehlbach <brianmuehlbach@yahoo.com> wrote:
> The Secret Doctrine borrowed from "The Great Chain"
> (and outdated 
> Renaisance theory see for example:
> 
>
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/ren.html
> 
> The best book on the subject is Lovejoy's famous
> Harvard 
> University lecture series from 1933, "The Grait
> Chain of Being" 
> 
> Eastern philosophy has no "great chain of being",
> which places humans 
> above all other animals. In most Eastern belief
> systems, the human
> soul can reincarnate in many shapes and forms. A man
> can
> become a fish and a fish can become God. There are
> no
> grounds in Eastern thought for resisting the central
> idea of
> evolutionary theory, that all animals are
> historically linked.
> 
> Japanese primate researchers assumed that each
> individual animal had 
> a distinct personality, and they did not hesitate to
> give their
> subjects names. They plotted kinship relationships
> over multiple 
> generations, believing that primates must have a
> complex family life, 
> just like us.
> 
> The Western view of apes regarded them as akin to
> Rousseau's "noble 
> savage" autonomous individuals, devoid of social
> ties and obligations,
> driven by instinct to swing haphazardly from one
> fruit tree to
> the next.
> 
> We now know that cultural learning among animals is
> widespread, 
> including birdsong, the use of tools by chimpanzees,
> and the hunting 
> techniques of whales. 
> 
> Along with the ridiculous Great Chain borrowings in
> The Secret
> Doctrine, its whole peopling of the earth human
> evolution theory is 
> wrong.
> 
> All representative of early modern humans, haven't
> changed much over 
> the years. And that's exactly the conclusion
> geneticists have been 
> drawing from our DNA.
> 
> Every single one of the 6 billion people on the
> planet today is
> descended from the small group of anatomically
> modern humans who 
> once lived in eastern Africa.
> 
> The group occasionally came close to extinction, but
> it never died
> out completely, and eventually it began to expand.
> By about 100,000 
> years ago, modern humans had moved north along the
> Nile Valley and 
> across the Sinai Peninsula into the Middle East.
> More than 60,000 years 
> ago they made their way along the coastlines of
> India and southeastern
> Asia and sailed to Australia. About 40,000 years
> ago, modern humans 
> moved from northeastern Africa into Europe and from
> southeastern Asia 
> into eastern Asia. Finally, sometime more than
> 10,000 years ago, they 
> made their way along a wide plain joining Siberia
> and Alaska and spread
> down the length of North and South America.
> 
> 
> For the best book on the above see:"The Emperor's
> New Clothes" by 
> Joseph L. Graves, Rutgers University Press, 2001.
> 
> Appart from refuting the content of The Secret
> Doctrine as noncence,
> he did write that scholars of the eighteenth and
> nineteenth centuries
> did not invent racism, they gave it a theoretical
> backing and practical 
> significance that it had never had before. 
> The Bible first proclaimed that all people descend
> from a single
> couple - Adam and Eve, and that account was often
> used to argue for 
> the unity of mankind.
> 
> But Christianity, like most religions, has often
> done as much to
> justify prevailing inequities as to challenge them.
> For example not only 
> Hermetism, but Christianity also profoundly
> influenced European
> ideas about the Great Chain of Being, a
> quasi-scientific theory arising
> from both religion and classical science that ranked
> living things,
> including human groups, into a hierarchy of moral
> worth. These ideas 
> led many Europeans to conclude that they were higher
> on the chain than 
> were other groups, closer to angels than to beasts.
> And the same we 
> see repeated, adjusted to the pseudo-scientific
> occult millieu of the
> 19th century, in The Secret Doctrine of Blavatsky.
> 
> Scholars started to point out that the differences
> among groups were 
> too great to have emerged in just a few thousand
> years. Either some 
> humans must have been living elsewhere in the world
> at the same time 
> as Adam and Eve - or the world was considerably
> older than the Bible 
> said it was. In either case, it seemed eminently
> reasonable that
> different groups could be the products of separate
> acts of creation. 
> 
> These "polygenic" theories became increasingly
> popular in the 
> nineteenth century. In the Dred Scott decision of
> 1857, which helped 
> spark the American Civil War, Chief Justice Roger
> Taney wrote that
> the treatment of Africans in America was justified
> because they 
> were "beings of an inferior order."
> 
> 
> 
> Brian.
> 
> PS Do not expect any reasonable reply by
> Theosophists to the issues 
> brought up in the above.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to
> http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ 
> 
> 


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
HotJobs - Search Thousands of New Jobs
http://www.hotjobs.com